Does anyone have any suggestions for training courses for Root cause analysis. My company is looking to leverage training in root cause methodologies. This would be used to train SMEs in IT areas so that each group is following a similar methodology

Does anyone know of any good training course that are IT centric that they can recommend?

I also doubt that there is a training for root cause analysis. There are different ways that are easy to understand if you just google:" Ishikawa, root cause, kepner trego" and you will find loads of examples of root cause methods that you can benefit from. You can also contact me on linked in and I can provide you with some useful documents. In my opinion Identifying root cuase is a skill that has to be devloped not taught.

While I agree each problem will be different, there are techniques used to help facilitate effective rca (ie kepner-tregoe).

Just wondering if anyone has any past experience with any of these types of offerings on the market etc

KT is indeed a process to identify the RC of a problem (in anything, including people). This is done by using a systematic process to identify possible causes via knowledge and experience. When you have too many or no possible causes using knowledge and experience, distinctions and changes are used to develop possible causes. Either way, possible causes are then tested against the problem specification to identify the most probable cause.

When an unstructured approach to RC identification is used often the person doing the work has difficulty translating to another person what it is they are doing. Also, conducting your RCA a different way every time will waste time and will (and I say this from bitter experience), lead you down the wrong path.

I facilitated a KT Problem Analysis workshop and left my problem specification on the white-board. A day later, someone came into the room, looked at the specification and said "I've seen this issue before..."

It's that kind of repeatable systematic process and visible thinking that jogs peoples' memories. Pushing KT out to all facets of your IT shop and indeed the business will get your organisation speaking the same language.

I am a Kepner Tregoe Program Leader "ITSM Problem and Incident Management" (one of only a handful in the world). Best thing I ever did.

Geoff
Try a company called ThinkReliability. When looking for good training courses I came across this one based in the US. Too expensive for us to transport them over to the UK but I read up on how they cause mapped the sinking of the Titantic and found a lot of good stuff.

We did end up using a UK based company but they really just re-taught us about the quality tools we'd all already learned during six sigma training.

If you can get your head around what TR do then I'm sure you will find it very useful. I did!!
DJR

Hope you have taken tests in ITIL. When I took the test, I actually did the root cause analysis. I got the right answers and I did so by eliminating the not so right answers. Root cause is based on law of elimination. When we are eliminating a cause we answer at least 5 whys why we are eliminating the cause .20% of the issues are the causes of 80% of problems. Thus spake Wilfredo Pareto and this is all six sigma. I hope that your oranization's ITSM solution provides root cause extension nodes linked with the CIs and the issue description. This will make your job easier as the root extension nodes in the ITSM solutions are derived from the historical MIs on the Problems in the past._________________regards,

Vivek
"the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself"
Winston Churchill